"That's a fire."
Then she cried out, her yell lost in a thunder of earsplitting sound. She felt herself lifted from the floor by a shock wave that slammed into her sickeningly. For a second she felt almost weightless as she flew backward through the air and then she saw, as though in a dream, the two vast doors splitting apart and bowling toward her across the room in an orange eruption. She thought they looked like cardboard doors. Then she thudded back against something hard and blacked out.
Chapter Ten
There was some idiot using a mallet inside his skull, and it was as if he was fixing fence posts. Every few seconds, whomp! There were also various sets of crazed characters having a tug-of-war with the muscles of his arms and legs, and there was a cretin who seemed to be marching around his body, or maybe swimming along his arteries, jabbing a knife into various key places, though mainly his ribs, as and when it suited him. Not to mention that some clown seemed to be eating into the small of his back.
"Apart from that," muttered Ryan, his voice like the sound of a rusty rasp, "I'm fine."
"Check," came Krysty's reply in the darkness of the speeding truck.
Ryan froze — physically not a difficult operation because he was hog-tied anyhow, lying on his left side like a strained bow, his wrist and ankles tightly laced together behind him. But it was more a mental shock, a freezing of the mind. What he'd just croaked out had been involuntary. He hadn't realized he was speaking aloud. He hadn't even realized the girl was awake.
He said tentatively, "I, uh... thought they cracked you over the skull when we got outside."
That had been when she'd suddenly, outside the bank building and in the harsh glare of the floods, managed to back-heel the groin of one of the sec men holding her. She was pretty good with her heels, he thought wryly. The guy had yowled, let her go and she'd twisted away from the second man and started sprinting across the open space toward the three black vans parked near the barbed wire. Strasser had yelled a warning, and three guys had emerged from behind the trucks and clobbered her. Ryan and Krysty had been left on the ground for maybe a half hour, Ryan getting more and more chilled by the minute, not to mention more and more panicky about the time factor that only he knew about. Then they'd been flung into the rear of one of the trucks and the doors had banged. No need for guards, Strasser had said. Waste of manpower. They weren't going to be able to free themselves to go anywhere.
"They did hit me over the head," Krysty Wroth said. "But I have great powers of recuperation."
Though it hurt him, Ryan laughed. It was kind of a choked grunt, sounding to his ears like the noise a guy made when someone poked him in the ribs. It felt like it, too.
She said, "Anyhow, thanks."
"Thanks?"
"For getting my..." She paused. "I was going to say, for getting my head off the block, but maybe for getting my ass off the block is more to the point."
Her tone was dry and sardonic. Ryan knew it was the humor of gritted teeth. You made a joke of the intolerable or else you went under.
He didn't know what to say. "Look, I should have stopped those bastards before things got too rough," he tried. "I couldhave. There were... other considerations... I'm sorry."
She said, "I know. It doesn't matter. Forget it. Life's too short."
He thought back to when she had actually been tied down to that foul block. She had not struggled, had not screamed or even whimpered. He was surprised, contemplating this, to realize that there had been a degree of serenity about her at that terrible time, as now. It was a strange yet oddly comforting aura of calm that seemed to surround her like a cloak. He hadn't analyzed it then — too many other things to worry about! — but he recognized it now as he reran the scene in his mind.
Such serenity at such a time seemed to him almost supernatural.
"You, uh... didn't seem too worried back there."
She said simply, "I knew Earth Mother was watching over me."
"I guess you realize your Earth Mother isn't going to save you every time."
"No, you don't understand. It's not a question of 'saving.' Earth Mother is not a physical presence. She doesn't appear in a flash of light..." she chuckled, and there was irony in her voice "...brandishing an M-16. She just is. At times that's comforting. There had been occasions when I've been stark crazy with fear and panic. Other times when it feels okay, feels right, feels like it's not going to work out too bad. That's how I felt then."
"How's it feel now?" said Ryan dryly. "I could do with some reassurance."
"Oh, I'd think we'll make out, don't you?"
He had to laugh again, and the minor convulsions trembled across his rib cage where Strasser's goons had put more than one boot in.
"Don't make me laugh. Please."
The truck lurched over something in the road — a rock or a pothole or maybe a small animal — and Ryan cursed vitriolically as he went up in the air and down again, landing on his wrists. Shafts of agony lanced up his arms. His shoulder blade felt seriously out of kilter for a second.
He muttered through clenched teeth, "Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea if your Earth Mother did appear waving a piece, because unless they untie me I think we're in deep shit. I hadn't counted on the bastards lacing us up. Didn't seem necessary. Thought they were just gonna shove us in with a bunch of armed goons."
He didn't tell her that, hog-tied as they were, he thought their chances of surviving were precisely nil. Untied he had options. Like this he might as well be a fish in a barrel.
She said calmly, "I think I can get my wrists free." Her voice was oddly neutral. She said, "Where are they taking us exactly?"
"To the Trader first. I guess Strasser wants to get him out of the way before moving onto the train. Always a chance our guys may wake up, and if he gets inside the war wag and trucks before that happens, he's laughing. But no way is that talking skull gonna hijack all that materiel. Right about now, J.B. should be blasting his way out of the bank, unless the goons tied him and Hun and the others up, which I doubt."
"Blasting?" she said incredulously.
"Yeah. Strict policy. All of us, since way back, are stuffed to the gills with explosives, or at least the means of creating explosives. An idea I had years ago, worked it out with J.B. Just in case we get caught by bad guys, we have all kinds of shit concealed in our clothes, our boots, our webbing. The bad guys take our pieces off us, grenades, knives, all that. The obvious. They don't bother to look at our boots for false inner soles, or check every stitch, every button. Some of us have big plastique-cored buttons on our long coats, others have wiring sewn into special pouches. You can't even feel it. Don't worry about J.B. He'll make out."
"Now I know why your bunch is talked about like it is," she said. "As special people. Sure is forward planning!"
"It's no big deal. It's called survival. These days you need all the help you can think up."
"Right. In this wonderful country where you could probably live your entire life without getting raped, abducted, murdered, eaten... without seeing a — what did you call it? Plague pit?"
His mind flew back to the scene in War Wag One, her angry face as she argued with him. It all seemed centuries ago.
"Great memory you've got," he growled. "In any case, it's still true. But when you're in our kind of business, even when you have a fierce rep, doesn't do any harm to take precautions." He muttered, "And all this crap just proves my point." His mind shot back again to the war wag, which triggered off another thought. "How the hell did Strasser manage to get his hands on you, anyway?"